Rant: the before and after on my favorite anime's art quality from episode 1 to episode 26 is wild

I started rewatching an old show from 2018 last week and by the final episode the character faces looked completely different, smoother and less shaky, because they obviously ran out of budget early and then fixed it by the end, has anyone else noticed that jarring shift in a series you were binging?

2 comments

2 Comments

richardk264d ago

Wait, isn't it weird how shows go through a weird glow up in real time like that? I had the same thing with a 2010s action series where episode 1 looked like it was drawn on a napkin with a crayon, but by the finale everyone had perfect anime hair and sharp jawlines. It's like the animators suddenly remembered they had a budget and went wild with the detail. You can literally track the point where they stopped using leftover ramen money for animation. The character's eyes went from looking like they were half asleep to staring straight into your soul.

the_sandra4d ago

Wait, wasn't I the one who always argued that bad early episodes just meant bad directing? That's what I used to tell myself, but @richardk26's ramen money analogy hit me hard. I totally see it now with this isekai I'm binging, episode 3's fight scenes looked like static slideshows, but by episode 12 the hair physics were doing full-on slow motion swooshes. That weird half-asleep eye thing is so specific and accurate, like the animators were just phoning it in until the check cleared. It's wild how you can almost pinpoint the exact frame where they got the extra funding, like a visual budget graph.